The Investigation

Officials Tending to Blame Qaeda for Madrid Attack

By TIM GOLDEN and DAVID JOHNSTON

Published: March 16, 2004

MADRID, March 15 — As the Spanish government all but dropped its claims on Monday that the Madrid train bombings were probably the work of Basque separatists, senior counterterrorism officials in the United States said they were increasingly convinced that Islamic militants were behind the attacks.

American intelligence and law enforcement officials said they had still not produced an official government assessment of who was behind the bombings. Nor, one intelligence official said, had the United States obtained any communication intercepts that might indicate who was responsible.

But from the nature of the bombings and the known ties of some of the initial suspects arrested by Spanish authorities, American officials said they believed that the attack might fit a new model in which local Islamic extremist groups, perhaps only loosely affiliated with Al Qaeda, might carry out attacks without the direct coordination of Qaeda leaders.

While United States officials have been unusually reticent about sending counterterrorism experts to Spain, the Spanish authorities have begun more actively seeking help from other foreign law enforcement and intelligence services, officials here said.

A team of Spanish security officials traveled to Rabat to begin pursuing leads in Morocco, while some Moroccan agents who helped investigate the bombings that killed 43 people last year in Casablanca began working Monday with Spanish police and intelligence officials in Madrid.

Spanish antiterrorism officials said the exchange reflected the investigation's current focus on the suspected role of a handful of Moroccan-born Islamic militants who operated in Spain and Morocco.

Investigators said they believed that at least two of three Moroccans arrested on Saturday provided logistical support and that several of their known associates may also have been involved, one Spanish antiterrorism official said.

But in a sign that the inquiry was proceeding at what officials described privately as a frustratingly slow pace, the Spanish interior minister, Ángel Acebes, sought to play down expectations that the terrorists who killed 200 people on rush-hour commuter trains last Thursday might be caught soon.

"This is going to be a complex investigation," Mr. Acebes told a news conference this evening. "It is going to be a long investigation."

An antiterrorism official said the police were hunting for several Islamic militants who they believe might have played some role in the bombings. The official also cautioned that the authorities might eventually have to release at least two of the five foreign-born men whom they took into custody on Saturday.

"There is not a lot of good evidence yet," he said. "These people are not going to say anything."

Spanish officials said the police were questioning a string of new witnesses in the investigation, including one who may have seen one of the bombers. Mr. Acebes refuted several reports that a suicide bomber might have blown himself up on one of the trains, and he said intelligence analysts were still working to identify a man with a Moroccan accent who took responsibility for the bombings on behalf of Al Qaeda in a videotape on Saturday.

Even the focus on Moroccan militants seemed somewhat tentative. The man whom Spanish and American counterterrorism officials described as the most important suspect in custody, Jamal Zougam, may have played only a secondary role in the bombings, one Spanish official said, providing telephone equipment used in making the bombs and other logistical help.

Mr. Acebes repeated Monday night that when the police arrested the five men — three Moroccans and two Indians — on Saturday they had been tied only to fraud in the sale of telephones. Two Spaniards of Indian descent who were detained at the same time have been questioned and released.

Mr. Zougam came to the attention of the Spanish police at least as far back as August 2001, when they searched his Madrid apartment at the request of antiterrorism investigators in France. Inside, investigators found the telephone numbers of several members of a suspected Qaeda cell in Madrid. Members of that cell, most of them Syrian immigrants, have been accused in a Spanish court case of providing support to some of the hijackers who crashed planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Among the Islamist militant literature and videotapes in the apartment, the police found a tape featuring the exploits in Dagestan of Abdelaziz Benyaich, a Moroccan-French citizen who has been held in Spain since June 2003 in connection with the Casablanca bombings. The Moroccan daily Aujourd'hui Le Maroc reported Monday that Mr. Zougam had once shared a Madrid apartment with Mr. Benyaich. A Spanish official said Mr. Zougam was also connected to other Moroccan militants who were believed to be part of the Qaeda network.

A Moroccan security official in Rabat, however, said they believed that it was premature to link Mr. Zougam or any of the other suspects to the Casablanca attacks. Moroccan officials blamed those bombings on Salafia Jihadia, an Islamic militant group also thought to be aligned with Al Qaeda.

Despite their concern about the Madrid attack, American officials said they had been more restrained than usual about sending forensic or other investigative help, given their aggressive involvement in the aftermath of recent terrorist strikes in other places.

American officials denied that deferring sending help was an effort to play down the possibility of Islamic militant involvement before the Spanish elections and said instead that it was a function of the professionalism of Spain's law-enforcement and intelligence services.

Tim Golden reported from Madrid for this article and David Johnston from Washington. Don Van Natta Jr. contributed reporting from London.